But, theres a problem. Especially for those of us who like to post in portrait orientation.The issue for me is that portrait-formatted posts are still subject to cropping height-wise. I still can’t post my full portait format image, because Instagram forces me to crop it in a 4:5 ratio when posting in portrait orientation. This means that critical information (to me, anyway) is cropped out, and context is still lost.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Here is the image I want to post:

Original Image with dimensions 1280 × 2048. Note the critical detals: reflection on ceiling and light-spill on the step.

Thrilled with the prospect of no longer having to load my image into Squaready in order to convert it into a a square by adding white space to the sides, before posting to Instagram, I fire up Instagram, load my image and hit the post format button. Problem: the top and bottom of my portrait is cropped:

The default crop action on import is to center the image. I lose the step-light completely, and the ceiling reflection is incomplete.

Moving the crop to put the ceiling reflection into context completely loses the step-light.

Moving the crop down to place the step-light into context causes the ceiling reflection to be lost.

Here’s what the output on Instagram would look like:

Default centre-cropped

Ceiling emphasis. No step-light.

Step-light emphasis. Ceiling context is lost.

The 4:5 ratio in Portait Format equates to a maximum image upload resolution of 1080px (width) by 1350px (height), which is scaled down to suit the viewport on your device. In the case of the fifth iteration of a telephony product from a company in Cupertino, this scales to a display image of 640px wide by 800px high within Instagram.

This is done, I assume, so that the viewports on mobile devices are filled horizontally, edge to edge. There is no white space allowed on either side of the image.

I wish that Instagram had allowed portrait formatters to post the whole image with this update, rather than cutting us off at the knees with the 4:5 ratio. I appreciate the constraints of the available screen real estate on viewports of mobile devices, but I don’t understand the aversion to a little white space either side of the portrait format, that will allow me to fit my whole image into the vertically allocated space.

There is clearly a bias towards landscape orientation on Instagram, and it must be addressed. Portrait formatters of the world, unite! We must revolt against the opression of the portrait format!